Samurai Review: Japan’s deadly warrior class appears in all their sexy, devilish glory | art

CJapan’s pre-modern warrior elite couldn’t survive inside suits of armor that leave you in awe and fear in this scintillating journey through their world of blood, strength, and artistic beauty. But it sure looks like it: samurai armor is so vibrant, so electric, with its exposed black face masks, mustaches, metallic plating and full-body cloth. The tops of their helmets include eagles, dragons, goblins, and even a clenched metal fist emerging from a warrior’s head. It is so intense that you feel its presence.

Then again, samurai were always ghosts in their suits. The metal mask became their face to the world, and their armor transformed them into someone else. This idea that in battle a warrior becomes someone else, a blood demon, is not unique to Japan: Viking “berserkers” lost themselves in ritual madness and may have believed themselves transformed into bears. Armor in medieval Europe was also not practical at all, it was a second skin, a full metal jacket that suppressed softness and symbolized the steely transformation of ordinary souls into assassins. But no culture has ever put as much creativity into blood lust as Japan did from the 13th century—when the bravery of the samurai overcame Mongol invaders—until the abolition of the class in the 19th century.

One of these terrifyingly inhabited cyborg armors has been loaned by the Royal Collection. It was a gift to James VI of Scotland and I of England from the son of the second shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty – but a thorny one. Luxuriously crafted from lacquer, silk, suede and metal, its surface exudes danger and mystery. It has sent a clear message to distant Britain: mess with us at your own risk.

This was not an idle threat. Screens, manuscripts, and illustrated books depict samurai armies in action. A knight in a samurai battle scene by Imamura Zuigaku Yoshitsugu is studded with arrows, but they lodge in his thick armor without causing any damage. But his unprotected horse is bleeding from an arrow wound near his heart. On the ground lay a warrior wearing magnificent armor that was now useless, his head having been cut off. That’s what those sleek, sweeping-curved blades — displayed nearby — are for.

However, the British Museum exhibition not only honors the art of war, but embraces love and peace. We meet a warlord with a song in his heart. In a 19th-century painting by Kano Ishun, a samurai literally takes time to smell the flowers as he wanders among the orange blossoms. The most famous customers of the early modern Edo pleasure district, or “floating world,” were samurai nobles. In a 1790s Chōbunsai Eishi painting titled “Twelve Sex Scenes in Edo,” we see the silhouette of a samurai having sex with a courtesan behind a screen while in the foreground two women caress the shiny blade of his unsheathed longsword.

This perverse piece of shunga art is perhaps the core of this exhibition’s appeal. Samurai warfare was violent but theatrical, cruel but glamorous, deadly yet exciting. Before the samurai blade sliced ​​you apart, its devilish appearance would have left you awestruck.

She feels disenfranchised when she arrives at the abolition of the samurai elite when Japan attempted to modernize in the 19th century. The images of The Last Samurai seem to show the passage of something wondrous from the world. When the twentieth century unleashed new horrors of mechanized mass warfare, there was no longer room for myth or chivalry. In the West and East, the rituals and theatrical performances that were part of feudal societies were irrelevant, especially after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So the exhibition’s conclusion is inevitably disappointing. You meet a life-sized Darth Vader, who is described here as a modern-day samurai, but to me isn’t as scary or mysterious as the originals. Most important is the presentation of Yukio Mishima, as he is known in the West, whose novels explored the allure of samurai violence and emotion in a hackneyed, commodified modern world, before abandoning it by committing seppuku, a traditional ritual of self-evisceration.

The samurai appear here as more than just killers: they are patrons of the arts, sensitive to nature, and masters of the civilized ways. However I would trade everything to see Samurai Attack. The show is dominated by the ghosts of dead warriors inside their empty suits. There are many forms of art here but none are more expressive than these images made of steel, silk and lacquer. It’s an extraordinary meeting. Samurai armor embodies an unforgiving truth about the human condition and what it can become.